Ill-Informed Gadfly

Hi there! Welcome to Ill-Informed Gadfly. This site is a clearinghouse for all my writing about movies, and I pledge to write something about every movie I see, old or new. It may only be a sentence, but I’ll get it on the record. And perhaps someday the site will become more than a favorite link for my friends and family.

Why should you care what I have to say? Well, if it helps, I’ve been reviewing movies for a while now. I wrote my first review for The Cavalier Daily, the esteemed student newspaper at the University of Virginia, in 1997. (The movie, as I was recently reminded, was “Hard Rain.” I was not kind.) Since then, I have been writing reviews for one medium or another pretty much continuously. In 1998, I joined the “91 Seconds on Film” crew at WNRN, an independent modern rock station conveniently located in Charlottesville, Va.

Eight years later, I’m still recording my minute-and-a-half-long exercises in spoken criticism. I hope they’ve gotten sharper and less pretentious over the years, but I can’t be certain. In the meantime, I sidestepped from critical writing into straight journalism and got a job with the Baltimore bureau of The Associated Press. I wrote stories about film and television whenever I could, and was ultimately rewarded with the opportunity to write a movie review. (I remember this one with affection: “The Powerpuff Girls Movie.”) A glorious 18 months or so followed in which I became one of a few people who would review movies that the AP’s top two critics couldn’t get to. And not all of them were obscure: One, “Chicago,” ended up winning Best Picture (undeservedly, of course).

That period was the highlight of my professional life. But it ended when, in a cost-cutting move (or so I was told), the AP decided that only the two full-time movie critics would write reviews.

I got a lifeline in 2005, when the AP launched “asap,” its younger readers’ service. Before the editors had figured out what kind of entertainment content they wanted to run, I began writing occasional reviews for them. Ultimately, they realized it wasn’t necessarily a good idea to have competing reviews of the same movie in-house. I can still write critical pieces for them if I come up with something the editor calls “high-concept” — basically, a review that doesn’t read like a review. Or so I’m told — I haven’t written one for a few months now. That’s partly my fault.

Now, about the name of the site: I was chatting in the office one day with my brilliant and film-literate friend and colleague, Jeremy Berlin, who, like many, has left the AP for a better gig (he’s a copy editor at The Atlantic Monthly). I told him I was planning to see a movie that I fully expected to hate (quite possibly one directed by Ron Howard), mostly so that I could tell people I hated it with the confidence that comes from, you know, having seen it. His response: “That’s good — you don’t want to be an ill-informed gadfly.”

I wasn’t, in that case. But in a larger sense, I still am. Because there will always be movies I haven’t seen, books I haven’t read, experiences I haven’t had that will prevent me from being fully informed about whatever it is I’m writing about. So I do what all good reporters do, particularly those who work for the AP: I try to learn enough to plausibly fake it. If I sound like I know what I’m talking about, I’m 90 percent there. But if you suspect that I’m completely clueless, you’re right. I can’t hide it. It’s right there at the top of the page: Ill-Informed Gadfly.

–Ben Nuckols, July 2006